I’m excited to announce that my next project, titled “Familiar Enemies”, is dropping on February 26! I’ll be previewing each of the nine tracks each day leading up to the release. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook to see the previews!

As a dedicated amateur opinion-haver, debating the individual NFL award winners throughout the season is one of my favorite pastimes. Most times the professional opinion-havers get the awards right, but they don’t decide for another month, so I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring and make some picks.

MVP

Patrick Mahomes

Drew Brees

Russell Wilson

This one isn’t as close for me as it is for others. What Mahomes has done this season is absolutely incredible. Brees is the clear #2, and I think Wilson’s insane efficiency puts him in the third spot. Aaron Donald is the only non-QB in this conversation, but he doesn’t crack my top 3.

Offensive Player of the Year

Patrick Mahomes

Drew Brees

Deandre Hopkins

This award always confuses me. Shouldn’t it be the same as MVP? Or is it the best non-QB? I don’t know. But I’m giving it Mahomes. He was that good. I’ll put Deandre Hopkins right behind Mahomes and Brees, as I thought he was the best and most valuable offensive player that isn’t a QB.

Defensive Player of the Year

Aaron Donald

Bobby Wagner

Khalil Mack

Was there any question on this one? Aaron Donald continues his reign as the best defensive player in the NFL, and came very close to breaking Michael Strahan’s sack record… as a defensive tackle! That is absurd. Bobby Wagner has been the best linebacker in the league for a while now, and held together a Seattle defense that experienced some extreme turnover. Mack’s stats aren’t gaudy, but his impact on the Bears can be felt throughout the entire conference.

Offensive Rookie of the Year

Baker Mayfield

Saquon Barkley

Nick Chubb

Saquon had a historic rookie season, but Baker turned around an entire franchise. He set the rookie record for passing touchdowns. There’s no question which player is more valuable. With Chubb coming in at #3, and Denzel Ward registering on the DROY landscape, it has become clear that the Browns had an absolutely epic draft class.

Defensive Rookie of the Year

Darius Leonard

Derwin James

Leighton Vander Esch

Bradley Chubb

Denzel Ward

In a normal year, any one of these guys would have dynamite cases for DROY, but this is a ridiculously loaded class. I’ll give the nod to Leonard, who filled up the stat sheet every single game while helping to turn around this formerly terrible Colts defense.

Coach of the Year

Andy Reid

Pete Carroll

Matt Nagy

This award almost always goes to a new coach that turned around a team, but I think two stalwarts deserve the recognition this year. Mahomes may be Football Jesus, but he is a still a second year QB coming into the season with only one start under his belt. The Chiefs faced the toughest schedule in the league, have a weak and hobbled defense, and still acquired the #1 seed in the AFC. Even if they didn’t, Reid deserves COTY for his handling of Mahomes alone. In Carroll’s case, he took on what looked like a rebuild and pulled 10 wins out of it. It’s hard to separate the brilliance of Russell WIlson from Carroll, but getting 10 wins out of this roster is incredibly admirable.

Executive of the Year

Chris Ballard

John Dorsey

Ryan Pace

This is a weird award, and it almost always goes to some guy who gets fired a couple years later. I’ll still give it a shot though. Chris Ballard played his cards right in Indy, realizing that he was in a full rebuild around a franchise QB, and making all his moves with that in mind. He traded down three spots in the 2018 draft, and netted three second round picks. He also snagged future all-pros Darius Leonard and Quenton Nelson. Dorsey was handed a boatload of picks by his predecessor Sashi Brown, but he made the absolute most of them. He also deserves credit for trading away Carlos Hyde to force Hue Jackson to play the far superior Nick Chubb. As for Pace, he correctly identified that his team was in a championship window and made the big moves to get them over the hump.

2018 was easily the best year for music since I started doing my “Favorites” lists a few years ago. Hip hop certainly dominated my Spotify plays, but a certain Texas soul singer earned the prestigious honors of “Allen Echo’s #1 Song and Album”: Mr. Leon Bridges.

When Bridges dropped his stellar debut album “Coming Home” in 2016, I wondered how far he could realistically get performing just (phenomenal) 60’s style soul music. Would he transition to a more modern sound? If so, would it ruin his brand? The answers were a resounding yes and no. His 2018 sophomore album “Good Thing” kept his soul roots while expanding his sound in a more modern and diverse direction. It’s catchy, fun, heartfelt, and has absolutely no filler or skippable tracks. In a year where my favorite rapper dropped TWO phenomenal solo projects, “Good Thing” is still my favorite album, by far. It’s that good.

Here are my top 25 albums and top 50 songs of the year. As always, these are ranked by my personal enjoyment. I am not a music critic.

Recently I’ve found myself in more and more quarrels with a certain type of political mind. A political mind that doesn’t necessarily have a specific ideology. A mind that doesn’t spend that much time discussing the actual effects of government policies. A mind that you may come to realize aligns with yours on ten out of ten policy positions — after an hour of heated political disagreement. A mind whose primary political identity can be summed up as Anti-Anti-Trump: opposed to those who oppose Trump.

Christmas is almost here. I can barely sleep. The NFL Draft is less than 24 hours away. For a hobbyist, I have put in an absurd amount of draft research in this year, so I feel compelled to write my useless insights down.

I promise that not all of my posts will be about guns, but I just got back from the March For Our Lives and had some thoughts.

In a section of my last post, I wrote about the constant lecturing and nitpicking that pro-gun folks are waiting to give gun control advocates when they get certain details about guns wrong. It’s annoying and mostly useless, I argued, but just try to get the details right and then you won’t have to worry about it. It’s been a few weeks since I wrote that, and in that time, young people (mostly high school students) across the country have protested, marched, walked out and led a national conversation on gun control that is bigger than any we’ve seen in recent memory. And since the mantle of the gun control issue has been taken up and is now held by young people, the detail nitpicking and condescending lecturing has gone from an annoying online trend to the dominant strategy of the pro-gun right.

After every mass shooting, American society re-enters its infinite loop of dumb arguments, bad analogies, and cynicism. Banging your head against a wall is more productive. Anytime I hear any variation of the following, I want to make like this corgi and teleport out of the discussion:

When I’ve got a lot on my mind and I can’t make the topic work for a song, social media is the outlet I often turn to. I know that I’m nothing more than a goldfish yelling into the surrounding ocean, but it’s cathartic and necessary for my sanity. This current political climate has created a permanent fog of anger and desperation among those of us that care about the direction of the country. Channeling that anger and desperation into something positive is what we should strive for, but the expression of frustration and establishing political positions is useful as well.

As another year wraps up, it’s always fun to look back and recognize the music that blessed our ears over the last 12 months. For me, 2017 was the year of K.R.I.T. Here are my favorite 10 albums and 20 songs: